In a previous post, I wrote about exporting data from Bare Bones Software’s Yojimbo and using Tomboy as an alternative. My migration script scraped the content from Yojimbo Sidekick and wrote XML files in Tomboy Note format. Though there were some drawbacks, such as tags being unavailable in Yojimbo Sidekick, I thought Tomboy’s search feature would be adequate. A couple of weeks trialling Tomboy proved that it wasn’t going to be a Yojimbo killer. Tomboy can’t compete in terms of overall usability and though it’ll work on my Linux and OS X machines, note synchronisation takes some setup that didn’t warrant further time investment.

Once again I turned to WordPress as an easy solution. There’s a risk of seeing WordPress as my hammer for everything that looks like a nail but it has taxonomies, a reliable-enough search functionality and being web-based, works across all my devices. I’m very familiar with the platform and have already built up my own set of tools to export and migrate content. Why not use WordPress? Getting data out of Yojimbo was another issue. The quick and easy Yojimbo Sidekick route already proved inadequate so it was time to dig in and reverse engineer Yojimbo’s storage mechanism.

Analysing and exporting the Yojimbo database

‘Reverse engineering’ turned out to be too lofty a term for the task. It was obvious after quick look that Yojimbo uses an SQLite database to store information. Firing up DB4S to analyse the tables and bit of analysis revealed the tables, columns and relationships that are important for exporting our notes. The columns are a little oddly named but it didn’t take long to figure out the necessary fields for migrating to WordPress.

Table: ZITEM

Column

Description

ZBLOB

This looks like an ID

ZNAME

The Yojimbo note title

Z_PK

The ID to the Z_15TAGS relationship table

Table: ZTAG

Column

Description

Z_PK

The Tag ID

ZNAME

The tag name

Table: ZBLOBLSTRINGREP

Column

Description

ZBLOB

ID

ZSTRING

String for unencrypted item

Table: Z_15TAGS

Column

Description

Z_15ITEMS1

Relationship ID

Z_25ITAGS

Tag ID

It became a simple matter of tweaking my Drupal to WordPress migration queries to extract from the Yojimbo database and create WordPress posts. Unlike with the Tomboy Notes route, it was possible to recreate the tags, which is what makes Yojimbo so useful. One drawback is that I haven’t figured out how to extract encrypted notes but I didn’t use Yojimbo to store important encrypted information so that wasn’t a priority.

WordPress as a Yojimbo alternative

Using WordPress as a Yojimbo alternative might not work for everyone but after several months use, I’ve found it to be an excellent cross-platform replacement. The installation and database runs on a NAS drive connected to my local network so is accessible to all my devices. Standard WordPress taxonomies, search and plugins makes content management simple once you’ve imported the Yojimbo content. In fact, by migrating away from Yojimo, I’ve ended up creating my own full-blown personal knowledge management system.

If you need to export your Yojimbo notes to a cross-platform alternative, give WordPress a try. You can grab my migration script from GitLab but please keep in mind that it was a quick hack to achieve a specific one-time objective. You may need to hack it to suit your own setup.

I’m a huge fan of Bare Bones Software’s Yojimbo, an extremely useful tool for keeping information organised. It has been one of my most important applications since around 2008. I rely on Yojimbo as my ‘Anything Bucket‘ to save scraps of information, from code snippets and troubleshooting notes to project logs and research sources. A downside is that it’s only available for Apple Mac OS X and therefore was a factor in tying me to the Mac OS X platform.

When I started moving back to Linux for day-to-day development work, finding a Yojimbo replacement was a top priority. A colleague pointed me towards the GNOME project’s Tomboy application which runs on Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac. Tomboy is a basic though perfectly usable cross-platform alternative but of course, I still needed to find a way of migrating my old Yojimbo notes.

Fortunately, Yojimbo has a sharing feature called Sidekick that exports your data to a set of web pages. Digging in to the Tomboy Note XML format showed me that Sidekick together with a bit of Python and some BeautifulSoup magic would provide a quick solution. I threw together pyYojimbo2Tomboy which I’m releasing under the The MIT License on GitHub in case anyone else needs it.

Keep in mind that Sidekick does not export the Yojimbo note metadata, like tags and modification times, but you can to migrate the title and note body over to Tomboy. Time permitting, I would like to find a way to save the extra metadata in a future version.

Though Bare Bones Software hasn’t released any updates and new features in a while, I still highly recommend Yojimbo for anyone on Mac OS X who needs an information organiser. It’s a little dated and doesn’t offer modern features you’d expect like an easy way to sync to the cloud and across devices. Personally, I find this one of Yojimbo’s strengths. An app in 2016 that doesn’t keep pestering you to push your information to some remote data centre with questionable privacy policies is somewhat refreshing.

Hopefully having a way to export data to a multi-platform open source alternative will reassure anyone worried about getting locked-in.